


to derail the mind of mine

by OneSweetMelody



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Vignette, excessive comma and em dash use, hozier lyrics in all lowercase because trash is as trash does, stylistic changes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 18:24:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19234630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneSweetMelody/pseuds/OneSweetMelody
Summary: It started in the way all things on the path to ruination did—slowly then all at once; so deceptive in the intervals of peace that it was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of unraveling. Andrew, familiar with the dull thrill of self destruction, almost ached with the desire to travel back to the point of disentanglement if only to yank the fraying threads from the spool himself. Self loathing was an art form that Andrew spent much of his formative years carefully crafting and honing until finally abandoning it for the much more difficult art of apathy and disinterest.Or, a series of vignettes about Andrew and his mental health.





	to derail the mind of mine

**Author's Note:**

> Only maybe vaguely beta read. This whole fic is very important to me for very a many reasons. 
> 
> This fic is for you if you: don't care about clear narrative structure with a beginning middle and end, want to figure out how many em dashes and commas I can cram into a single paragraph long sentence, love Andrew Minyard, can deal with twelve different stylistic changes.

i.

It started in the way all things on the path to ruination did—slowly then all at once; so deceptive in the intervals of peace that it was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment of unraveling. Andrew, familiar with the dull thrill of self destruction, almost ached with the desire to travel back to the point of disentanglement if only to yank the fraying threads from the spool himself. Self loathing was an art form that Andrew spent much of his formative years carefully crafting and honing until finally abandoning for the much more difficult art of apathy and disinterest. He’d taken a brief hiatus, as such he called his years of court mandated medication, from his ardent studies but planned to resume them with newfound diligence after rehab.

However, that plan went to shit.

(And Andrew found himself wondering when he’d fallen back into the trappings of self deception.)

ii.

 _We’ll have to keep an eye on things._ She’d said.

 _We don’t know what long term effects the medication may have._ A pause. _It’s very likely that you’ll have other episodes in the future and without medication—_

 _No._ His own voice seemed much further away.

 _Okay._ She might have nodded. _No medication. But you have to know it’s a possibility, Andrew. You can’t ignore it._

He pretended to ignore her.

iii.

Kevin’s first month sober had everyone’s nerves fried. He was sullen and quicker to criticism than usual. He picked fights where none were to be had with increased ferocity and frequency. Even Andrew was impressed for a moment before falling back to the usual cycle of denying Kevin the satisfaction of his tantrums earning him anything but greater frustration.

Aaron glared. Nicky fussed. And Neil watched Kevin with almost the same intensity he reserved for Andrew.

Andrew drank alone.

It never made him feel at ease, free of inhibition with lessened regard for consequence, loose lipped and carefree. Liquid courage had almost no effect on someone like him—a monster— when he already did however he pleased. A bottle of scotch did little to change his natural disposition. All it did was numb the edges of harsh memories and bring others into sharp relief. Sometimes he wondered what Kevin saw at the bottom of a bottle that made him cling to it like a lifeline rather than try to grow a spine and stand up for himself for once in his pathetic life.

He threatened to skin anyone who gave Kevin a drink.

iv.

He hasn’t gotten out of bed in days and everything is Muted and Quiet. Someone, probably Neil, has drawn the windows closed so the dorm is Dark with only the thinnest sliver of sunlight trickling through. His doppelganger visits briefly to stare at him with an eerily familiar blank expression on his face.

“Are you getting out of bed anytime soon,” his twin asks. Andrew stays in his blanket cocoon. “I can’t go to anymore of your classes for you Andrew. I have my own degree to worry about.”

He swears, slams some textbooks down on the desk, and storms out of the room with all the theatrics he can muster. Andrew doesn’t move from the bed.

v.

Neil learns his body in slow painstaking increments. He doesn’t hold Andrew delicately, as if he were something fragile and barely held together by his own psyche. His hands are gentle but firm, never gripping too hard or turning into light cloying touches.

~~He thinks back to their first first kiss and their second first kiss and nothing in those memories seems real and for weeks and months every subsequent kiss feels like a dream that Andrew is barely holding onto the edges of as if it’s going to slip away the second he blinks. Then for a while it settles down to a calm quiet before the threat of space and distance and time forces him to open his eyes to see if Neil is still there.~~

He’s unknown. They’re both unknown. But learning— slowly, carefully, painstakingly— is worse than simply being known.

vi.

“What the fuck was that back there Minyard? Do you have a goddamn death wish? You know what, I don’t want to know. But it’s not happening again. I don’t care if you have to recite your damn times tables to stay calm but I’m not having another one of my players end up in FBI custody today. Nod your head if you understand. Christ, does he even know how you…forget it. It’s not my business. Let’s get moving. I’m not leaving Abby alone with the rest of those dumbasses and my team any longer. I’m serious Andrew, watch yourself.”

vii.

The thing is, Andrew doesn’t want to be a cliché of self destruction. It’s like he’s ticking off boxes left and right: cigarette smoke, rooftops, fast cars, bottles of booze. He doesn’t care what people think about him. If they think he’s unstable or violent or a sociopath.

Reduced to his parts, he should be more than that. He’s never wanted to be more than that and the idea of wanting more than that sits strangely in his belly. Because it means he has a whole life, a whole personhood to craft outside graduation and whatever’s left of his deals. He’s not sure how to be a person but he’s sure being a person isn’t supposed to feel like this.

viii.

sometimes he feels like his skin is too tight to hold his bones.

he’s buzzing. like he’s knocked back a triple shot of espresso and downed an energy drink and popped a handful of caffeine pills. he’s familiar with this feeling. he wants to cut away this part of himself and pretend for a moment, that bee wasn’t right, that he could have done anything to change this, that he has perfect control of his own mind.

he lights a cigarette. stubs it out. lights another. snubs it out. lights another and holds it in his hand before he remembers he’s supposed to be quitting.

he snubs it out.

he makes himself a pot of coffee, following his usual morning routine, before he remembers and throws the entire machine into the trash.

there’s a reason for the stretches where his mind is too fast and his temper is even faster— something concrete to blame other than his own traitorous mind and the ghosts of parents he’s never actually known. he and aaron are twins, identical, but this isn’t something that connects them.

he remembers his biology classes and his psychology classes and nature versus nurture. he can pick apart all the ways he’s different from his twin because they’re a sideshow attraction, something to study in a lab where they’re faced against a lineup of other twins in a twisted game of “addict or nutcase”. because if aaron got tilda’s predilection for substance abuse, andrew got the worst parts of her undrugged personality.

he’s unhinged, untethered, unbound. he’s not floating free but hurtling into the sun and he can’t stop running and running because his mind won’t shut down and everything is everything and all at once and he wonders why when he closes his eyes he can hear the buzzing of the refrigerator and feel the faint breeze from the air-conditioner.

he hasn’t had more than three hours of uninterrupted sleep in almost a week but if his body knows his mind doesn’t because he’s still nothing but restless energy and frayed nerves and bad decisions.

he’s all carefully crafted control that keeps him together at the best of times and the worst of times but he’s used to the crumbling apart and picking up whatever scrambles of a person are left behind or carrying the pieces into bee’s office and throwing them at her until she can nudge a few around enough for him to pull them all back together again into the semblance of a person he’s getting better at creating.

he can deal with the lows of the lows because the lows have always been him as he is but the highs are someone else, another andrew he doesn’t care to know even if everyone else has already met a different version of him.

because this other andrew secretly bottles up all the bright things that real andrew should be feeling and experiencing and hoards them until finally unleashing them slowly then all at once. but then it’s too much too soon.

his private game of tripping strikers sends an unassuming freshman backliner to abby’s office. his debit card purchases an array of foreign chocolates worth a few hundred dollars. his words are faster, sharper, deadlier.

there’s that hole that he wants to fill and fill until the dull ache in his chest leaves and he can finally breathe.

neil says no and that’s the only real thing in this fog.

ix.

Andrew is intimately familiar with his demons. He knows the ones that keep him up at night or startle him awake at 3 am. There are some nights he’d prefer those demons to the blank moments of insomnia.

x.

Neil: Testing people to see how willing they are to decipher what you mean isn’t always going to get you the results you want.

Andrew: It worked with you.

Neil: I’m an anomaly.

Andrew: You’re a nuisance.

Neil: You pretend that you don’t deflect things you don’t want to hear.

xi.

It goes like this: he feels nothing but muted colors and sounds, it’s like being underwater and listening for the echoes of feelings and reactions he should have.

It goes like this: he wants to crawl out of his own skin because it’s not his own, it’s never been his own, it’s dirty and covered in unseen grime and hands that aren’t his and the memory of cries that are.

It goes like this: he touches Neil’s hair and it’s softer than it should be after years of hair dye and mistreatment but he’s soft hair and sharp smiles and even sharper smiles and it’s too much and not enough all at once and it’s always new.

It goes like this: he talks to his family and talks around them and they misspeak more often than not but they try again and again to the point of stupidity and it’s like they’re all stuck with each other.

It goes like this: he considers medication and considers and considers and talks to Bee in an endless loop.

xii.

Aaron works his way through Andrew’s apartment in a destructive whirlwind. His dirty clothes are shoved into a laundry basket. Unwashed dishes make their way into the dishwasher. Trash disappears into bags and those bags disappear from his apartment.

Aaron finishes without a word and places a bottle of Gatorade next to Andrew and takes a spot across from his brother with his own glass of water.

“You reek,” Aaron says finally. “I draw the line at forcing you into the shower.”

“You should have drowned in the womb.”

Aaron scoffs and rolls his eyes, “that’s not how that works.”

He looks around the apartment again with a critical eye as if looking for something else to clean or clear away. The last time, also the first time, Aaron told him that he wasn’t Andrew’s personal cleaning service. At least there weren’t any broken dishes this time, a small kindness towards his brother. Andrew doesn’t bother with a response. It’s several minutes before Andrew reaches to uncap his Gatorade and take a small sip. He pretends not to notice the relieved set to Aaron’s shoulders.

“Neil called Not-Dobson,” Aaron says slowly and it feels like a strange admission between the two of them, that Aaron talks to Neil and that they talk to Andrew’s new therapist. And maybe it should feel more like they’re conspiring against him but the words _support network_ echo in his mind.

He takes a large sip, then another, and things aren’t any better but he also can’t quite remember what was wrong before.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @thepalmtoptiger where i sometimes say things of note


End file.
